Decades of Influence

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There are many ways to gauge the impact of HBR articles—by the improved performance companies enjoy when they implement the authors’ lessons, by the advancement of managers who’ve found inspiration or gained practical skills, by the extent to which new terms (such as “competitive advantage” and “disruptive innovation”) embed themselves in the language of business. All these examples come directly from the everyday world of work—but all are hard to quantify.

The academic field of management provides a means for assessing HBR’s influence in measurable terms. Professors have always been important contributors to HBR’s pages, and they’ve helped turn the magazine into a forum for the ideas at the foundation of management theory. So one way to quantify the impact of various articles is to look at how frequently they are cited in academic writing.

A systematic search of the Google Scholar database revealed that of the 12,000 articles HBR has published over the past 90 years, 53 have garnered 1,000 or more citations. The list begins in the 1950s and is distributed across 10 broad subject categories. Certain topics caught fire in certain periods—strategy in the mid-1990s, operations a little earlier. Some pieces spawned follow-on articles and books that extended their reach. Below is a visual representation of the search results—a detailed time line of the most influential ideas that have shaped management thinking over the years.

And the Winner Is...

To bring our archive to life in visual form, HBR turned to Kaggle.com, a platform that hosts data competitions. We received entries from all over the world and chose that of Eamonn O’Loughlin, an analytics consultant for Accenture Ireland and a PhD fellow in the dynamics lab at University College Dublin. To see other submissions, go to: www.kaggle.com/c/harvard-business-review-vision-statement-prospect.

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